Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Holocaust Memorial Day and the Pathetic Palestinians

By Alan
Caruba

“The
demands, conditions, stipulations, and decisions pouring out of Mahmoud Abbas’s
office in the last month or so have persuaded everyone concerned that the
Palestinian’s mind is in a total muddle,” opined an April 24 Israeli-based
newswire Debka File. It reported that Israel’s Prime Minister, Binjamin
Netanyahu, had broken off peace talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA), also
known as Fatah, after Abbas, its leader, had announced Fatah would unite with
Hamas, another Palestinian group with which it had been at odds since 2007.

Confusing?
You’re not alone. As Debka File put it, “No one in Jerusalem or Washington can
figure out what he wants. And even his closest aides believe that he doesn’t
know his own mind and are afraid of what he may dream up next.”

As Israel
commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day which began at sundown on Sunday, Abbas
grabbed international headlines by declaring that the Holocaust was the “most
heinous” modern crime, but seemed to equate what happened to Europe’s Jews
during World War Two with Palestinians today who, he said, “suffer from
injustice, oppression, and are denied freedom and peace…” The fact that they
and the Arab League have refused for over
six decades to accept Israel’s right to exist went unmentioned. Now that’s
chutzpah!

“In Gaza
City, meanwhile,” reported Debka File, “his Fatah and the rival Hamas
celebrated their umpteenth unity pack in nine years, although not a single
clause of any of the foregoing documents was ever implemented.”

If the
Palestinians as a whole and the two organizations that self-identify as
representing them seem unable to function in a rational fashion, that is a fair
conclusion.

This is
what the Israelis have been dealing with before and ever since Yasser Arafat
created the Palestinian Authority in 1959 directing it until his death in 2004.
Its original purpose was the destruction of Israel, but Arafat modified that on
occasion to give the impression of legitimacy and to seek ways to return Israel
to its original borders in 1948 and later 1964. In 1987 he launched a prolonged
Palestinian uprising known as the Intifada, killing many Israelis. And you
wonder why Israel has built high walls and fences in some areas?

Hamas is
closer to Arafat’s original goal, having been openly dedicated to the
destruction of Israel since its formation in 1987 during the Intifada. It is an
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and has controlled Gaza since June 2007,
having forcibly driven out Fatah representatives. It has been deemed a
terrorist organization by the U.S. since 1997, as does the European Union,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, but not by Iran,
Turkey, and China. In 2005 Israel turned over the Gaza strip to the
Palestinians as a gesture of peace which has been rewarded by constant
rocketing launched from there ever since.

Sarah
Stern, the founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET)
said on April 25 that “Since September 13, 1993, the Palestinian Authority has
been playing a double, duplicitous and highly dangerous game of ‘good cop/bad
cop.’ While the Palestinian Authority ended their diplomatic isolation in the
community of nations by signings Oslo, Wye, the Roadmap for Middle East Peace,
and all subsequent agreements, they have used their enhanced diplomatic status
to wage a nonphysical war against Israel through systematic campaigns of
distortion and dehumanization of Israel and the Jew in the international court
of public opinion.”

EMET
condemned the Palestinian Authority for supporting terrorism against Israel
“regularly applauding suicide bombers and calling on children to become
martyrs…it is time to stop giving American’s taxpayer dollars, to the tune of
more than $600 million a year, to the PA.”

One has to
ask why Secretary of State John Kerry has wasted months trying to secure peace
between the Palestinian Authority and Israel when the former has never
demonstrated any real effort to engage in peace beyond the formalities of
treaties it has routinely ignored. The announcement that it would join with
Hamas is testimony to its dedication to destroying Israel in its quest to
declare control of the disputed area. Since 1948, Israel has been a sovereign
state. All previous efforts by the U.S. have ended in failure.

Lately,
the PA, designated a United Nations “observer”, has been applying for
membership to 15 UN bodies. The UN has demonstrated its support for the PA for
years, even annually celebrating a day devoted to the Palestinian “refugees”,
the oldest such “refugee” group in history, due in large part by the refusal of
Arab nations to extend citizenship to them. The UN has maintained UNRWA, its
Relief and Works Agency, since 1948 when Israel was attacked and defeated its
neighbors. In subsequent wars it expanded its borders to include the Golan
Heights and the West Bank.

If the
Fatah-Hamas unity effort is successful, it will further isolate the
Palestinians who have few, if any, friends left in the Middle East and it
renders the United Nations, presumably devoted to peace, as pathetic as the
Palestinians.

The
restraint that the Israelis have demonstrated over the past 66 years has been
quite extraordinary. They are not, however, going to accept several generations
of Palestinians to “return” into their nation where many have never lived since
1948.

The Palestinians
have not given Israel any reason to have any confidence in what they say
publicly for world consumption and the latest “unity” announcement at least
confirms their bad intentions. In addition to Hamas, the Iranian pawn,
Hizbollah, composed largely of Palestinians, gives Israel even less reason to
regard them as anything than enemies.

And while
this goes on, the Israelis must make plans to respond to the failure of the
U.S. effort to get Iran to stop enriching uranium to make their own nuclear weapons.
When it is declared dead, they will have no other option than to attack Iranian
facilities.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.